asked questions that sized up a candidate’s talents, attitude, and potential.
Ten days later, letters were sent to everyone interviewed. Jacky estimated
that it took approximately two minutes for one of his staff members to
prepare a notification letter to be sent to a GO applicant. If 300 new GOs
were needed, 450 to 500 were told they would be hired, to provide a
reserve pool for GOs who quit or were fired during the season. The letters
told those who were accepted to sign employment contracts (these were
provisional upon the person actually being assigned to a village), and that
they would be notified two weeks prior to departure to their assigned
village. This could be a few months later for those who departed during
the regularly scheduled rotation period, but could easily become four to six
months for the “extra hires” used to replace GOs who quit or were fired
during a season.
Jacky was concerned about the time delay between recruitment and
“shipment“. “My staff spends 40% or more of their time on the phone with
new recruits who want to know when and to which village they are going.
They spend 15 minutes on each call. The problem is that wedon’t have the
answers to their questions. My staff is too busy anyway – and this makes
more work for everyone, especially me.”
When the time for departure arrived, a member of Jacky’s staff talked to
the new GOs about flight information, their villages, clothes to bring, and
their new bosses, the chiefs of the villages.
“I think the Navy has copied our philosophy,” laughed Jacky:
You know how they say “It’s not just a job, it’s an adventure”? When I inter-
view around the country, it seems the people don’t care so much about the
pay [about 400 US dollars per month] and benefits [room and board, bar
allowance, medical plan], or the long hours I tell them they will have to work.
They want to see the world, and they know they can with us.“You don’t earn a lot of money, but if you don’t drink all your salary at the
bar, at the end of the season you come back with a lot,” said Patrice Prual,
34, a village manager at Cherating [Malaysia]. Patrice recalled that when
he was a schoolteacher in Paris, “at the end of the month I had zero.”
The stress of paying bills, furnishing a home, owning a car, commuting
to work – the average GO has none of this. “I prefer to work at Club Med
with palm trees, coconuts, sun, sea,” said 30-year-old Tazuko Shimamuda
of Japan, who has been doing just that for six years. “It’s not perfect, but
it’s better than taking the metro to work every day.”*
After each recruiting season, résumés of the newly “hired” GOs were
kept on file in the New York office until Jacky and the chiefs of the village
346 Relationship Marketing
*Barry Kalb, “Play Is Hard Work for Club Med Staff,” The New York Times,
September 24, 1986, p. A-33.